If you have decided to migrate from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics 360, you may be looking for new ways to generate the types of reports your organization used within the Adobe Analytics infrastructure. This post presents a quick and easy solution for reporting on Google Analytics 360 data in Data Studio in a way that replicates Adobe Analytics’ rules-based approach to data dimension classification.

Defining Calculated Dimensions in Data Studio

Let’s say that you want to look at your daily data using these classifications:

Weekend/Weekday

Morning/Evening

You can follow four simple steps to calculate these classifications in Data Studio based on standard Google Analytics 360 data:

Connect Google Analytics as a data source in your Data Studio report

Create a calculated dimension

Add this function to create the Weekend/Weekday classification (calculation of day of the week data):

CASE WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Day of Week Name, "Saturday|Sunday")
THEN "Weekend" ELSE "Weekday" END

Add this function to create the Morning/Evening classification (calculation of hourly data):

CASE WHEN (REGEXP_MATCH(Hour, '0[0-9]|1[0-1]'))
THEN 'AM' ELSE "PM" END

Adding the Morning/Evening classification function in Data Studio.

Reporting on Calculated Dimensions in Data Studio

Thanks to Data Studio’s calculated dimensions feature, you can report on any rules-based dimensions that your organization needs:

These line charts indicate session count over different time periods for the AM/PM and Weekday/Weekend dimension values that we calculated in Data Studio.

Contact us for more questions about migrating from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics.

4 Comments

Fay
on April 18, 2018 at 1:32 pm

What I’m missing here is how you set the scorecard with morning / evening and weekday / weekend. The regex can be used for the time series but I can’t figure out what the regex would be to show just the evening sessions (since PM is just formulated as “else” in the regex).

For the morning sessions I created a filter in Data Studio based on the regex. So it filters sessions on hour regexp contains 0[0-9]|1[0-1] but I can’t figure out what the regex then would be for evening.

Same issue is for the evening sessions, how can I separate them in a regex to show just the weekend sessions.

This is a great question. Let me briefly clarify. The calculated dimension does use regex, but it is not inherently a filter. It just classifies the underlying dimension differently based on the regex rules. The handy thing about that is, once the calculated dimension exists, you can use it as a filter in your dashboards.

The way to approach limiting your data to only PM or only weekend sessions is with a filter. Once you have the calculated dimension, you can create simple filters in Data Studio following the logic of Include [dimension name] contains/equals [Filter Value]. The way we have the embedded dashboard configured uses several filters, such as include Weekend of Weekday contains Weekend, which returns only data for Weekend sessions when applied.

Hope this helps answer your question. Please reach out if you want more clarification.

You are absolutely correct. This functionality is not limited to GA360 license holders. This approach would work just fine for a standard Google Analytics account using Data Studio as well. This post is geared towards clients that are moving from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics, which typically involves a GA360 implementation. We find that many times these users would like to replicate some of the classification rules available in Adobe to aggregate/classify data dimensions for reporting purposes. The calculated dimensions feature in Data Studio offers an easy way to do that.

I appreciate you calling attention to the fact that this solution has broader applicability.